Copying Missing Donors

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Copying Missing Donors

The Database ⇒ Copy Missing Donors menu option allows you to copy missing donors, donation categories, and donor categories from one specified year, and any intervening years, to another specified year. Choosing it bring up the following window:

To use it, select your desired From and To years from the drop-down lists of all years of data currently in the database. They can be one or more years apart. Then click OK, and follow the prompts. For most common uses the From Year will be less than the To Year, but you can also use it with the From Year greater than the To Year.

Here's why you might need this. When you first start working on a new year by using the Maintenance ⇒ Change Year menu option, it copies all donors and categories from the current year to the new year you have selected. It also optionally skips copying donors that have not donated in the last 2 years, which you may later decide was a mistake. Also, subsequent times that you switch to that year, it does not copy any further donors or categories.

So, suppose you've been working on 2015, and on January 1, 2016, you switch to 2016 for the first time. All donors and categories from 2015 (that you have entered so far!) will be copied to 2016. Now, suppose you notice a few late donations that you still need to enter for 2015, and they are for new donors. You switch back to 2015, and enter those donations and donors. Then, switch back to 2016. The new donors aren't in 2016! That's what this feature is most commonly used for, to copy those missing donors, in this example from 2015 to 2016. In this case, when you were in the 2016 year, you would use Database ⇒ Copy Missing Donors, using the From Year 2015 and To Year 2016 to fix things up.

Of course, it is possible to just re-enter the missing donors manually. This is a bad idea for two reasons. First, it's extra typing! More importantly, if you enter a donor manually in two different years, and then do a report that compares donations between the two years by donor (such as. Reports ⇒ Donor ⇒ Donation Info ⇒ Sort by Name or any of the other reports on that sub-menu), it won't correctly match up the donations for that donor for the two years.

Another cause for missing donors is that when you do first open a new year, and it prepares to copy from the previous year, it asks you whether to skip copying donors that don't have donations within the last two years. If you answer Yes to that (a reasonable choice), some donors will be skipped. If you later do get some donations from those donors, you would want to bring those donors forward by using this new option. (Of course, doing so makes it as if you answered No to that question.)

Another important question to which you should understand the answer is, what is the program's definition of a "missing" donor or category? Contrary to what you might expect, it is not based on the name of the donor or the name of the category! Basing it on names would be too error-prone. You might have entered the same person in two different years with slightly different spellings, or you might genuinely have two different John Smiths. Both of those would cause errors if it was done by name.

Rather, the rule really is that if a donor or category didn't get into a given year (either the one you're copying from, or the one you're copying to) by being copied in the first place by the program, it is considered to be missing. ("Copied by the program" includes being copied by the Change Yearroutines, or by the Copy Missing Data routine.) This has some interesting side-effects, however. Suppose you did hand-enter a new donor record for John Smith in two different years. If you then use this routine, you will end up with two copies of John Smith in the year you are copying to!

It's also important to understand that the program only copies entire missing donors. It does not update changed addresses or other information for existing donors! That must be done by hand, if it is important to you that previous year's records for the donors also have the same corrected address. (In most cases, we would guess, that would not be important – only the current year would have to be updated with new addresses.)

If you use Copy Missing Donors and then find that you have duplicate donors in one of the years, because you had already re-created the same donor manually in the year you were copying to, you can use the Database ⇒ Merge Duplicate Donors menu option to fix that, by deleting the duplicate.

The program also watches out for this process creating duplicate Member/Envelope Numbers, which isn't supposed to be allowed, and tells you how to find them and fix them if they are found.

Multi-Year Reports and Copying Missing Donors

Prior to version 3.42 of DONATION, all of the multi-year reports on the Reports ⇒ Donor ⇒ Donation Info sub-menu had a weakness, in that they only showed donors that were present in the current year. So if there was a donor with donations in the prior year(s) that had not been copied to the current year, it would not show up on any of those reports, and thus the total donations figures for the prior year(s) at the bottom of the report would not actually be correct. (The same weakness applied to Reports ⇒ Donor ⇒ Old Donors - it only showed donors present in the current year, who had not donated in the past 2 years, but had in prior years.)

This weakness was another reason for using Database ⇒ Copy Missing Donors, to make those reports complete.

In version 3.42, however, all of those reports have been fixed to include all donors in all relevant prior years, whether or not they have been copied to the current year. (The relevant prior years are the current and previous year for all but one of the reports mentioned above, and the current and prior three years for Reports ⇒ Donor ⇒ Donation Info ⇒ Last 4 Years. As a result, their totals for all years will now be correct, and Database ⇒ Copy Missing Donors is no longer required to fix them.

However, this is not the case when you do multi-year report, for over 2 years, with the Reports ⇒ Custom Reportsmenu option. While a report for 2 years will automatically include any donors in the earlier year which are missing in the later year, reports for over 2 years only include donors that are present in the last of those years. If you want to be sure to have all donors in all of those years included (including ones you might have deleted in later years), you could first use Copy Missing Donors to copy all of the donors forward from the first of the years, and all intervening years, to the last of those years. In fact, the program will prompt you about whether you wish to do that, if there are missing donors in the last year, when you run such reports, and if you answer Yes, it will do so automatically without you having to go to that menu option.

Pledges and Copying Missing Donors

If you use pledges, there are some further details you should understand about what happens when you copy missing donors.

What happens exactly depends on what you have selected in the Pledges tab of the Maintenance ⇒ Main Window Options window. (Note: If you have turned off the display of the Annual Pledge field on the Donor Details tab of that window, no pledge information will be copied, because the assumption is that you aren't using pledges.)

If you select the pledging type "Simple Annual Pledge", you will be asked whether or not to copy the Annual Pledge amounts.

If you select the type "Annual with Start Date and Category", you will be asked whether or not to copy the pledge data. If you answer Yes, pledge start dates in the donor records copied to the other year will be set to be January 1st of that other year.

If you select the type "Multi-Year", no question will be asked. Any multi-year pledges whose range of years includes the year that you are copying to will be copied over, with exactly the same details as they had in the year you are copying from.

Cleaning up after a Temporary Copy Missing Donors

Suppose you do a Copy Missing Donors from a few years back, to the current year, in order to do some specific reporting, like a list of the addresses or donations for all donors in the last 5 years. But after that, you don't want your current year's database cluttered up with many donors from past years who have never donated.

You could use Reports ⇒ Donor ⇒ Non Donors in that case to find all donors in the current year's list that have never donated, with the number of years each one has been in your current database, and then consider manually deleting ones that have been around for a while and never donated, or that you know have died, lost interest in your organization, or whatever.

Another helpful report for this purpose is Reports ⇒ Donor ⇒ Old Donors, which lists donors that are present in this year or last year's list of donors that have not donated in either year, but did donate in previous years, with the date of their last donation and the total amount they have ever given.